Building Resilient Regions for a Secure and Resilient Nation

DomPrep Action Plan

Upp Technology, Inc., in concert with Booz Allen Hamilton and selected other experts in the field preparedness and response, is a proud partner in the creation of the DomPrep Action Plan: Building Resilient Regions for a Secure and Resilient Nation.

Federal, state, local, tribal, territorial, nongovernmental, and privatesector organizations and agencies share a common national interest in the safety and security of the United States and its diverse population. Some components of the homeland security enterprise are now facing the inevitable reduction of investment in the initial establishment of capabilities and struggling to realize sustainment strategies to maintain the capabilities. Recently, the 2012 federal budget effectively eliminated grant funds for jurisdictions in half of the Tier II regions of the Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI), leaving those jurisdictions and their states in no position to pay for fully sustaining capabilities. In the current climate of budget deficits, such cuts to federal preparedness grant dollars are almost certain to continue their dramatic decline.

“States and localities are facing mounting fiscal challenges,” stated former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker’s State Budget Crisis Task Force in a July 2012 report. “While the extent varies significantly state by state, there can be no doubt the magnitude of the problem is great and extends beyond the impact of the financial crisis and lingering recession.” Determining how states and jurisdictions will be able to maintain capabilities that had been created and funded over the past decade by more than $34 billion in federal preparedness grants is now the homeland security enterprise’s fundamental resourcing challenge.

Throughout 2012, DomPrep addressed this challenge by conducting a series of surveys and hosting regional workshops and teleconferences across its nationwide network of homeland security practitioners to canvass the thinking in the field on how to sustain preparedness capabilities. DomPrep held workshops in the Northeast and Midwest regions, conducted a series of teleconferences with practitioners in the Southwest region, hosted an online workshop in the West region, and conducted surveys in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions.

The survey results and input from the workshops and conferences support the current U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) declaratory policy on homeland security, which is moving toward bottom-up preparedness based on networks of resilient communities.

From these results, DomPrep has derived five key findings that must be brought to the attention of policymakers at all levels of government:

I. Regardless the amount of funding, the federal government must target what remains of grants, other financial resources, and technical assistance on efforts supporting cross-jurisdiction, cross-agency, and cross-discipline collaboration for: threat assessment, risk analysis, planning, exercises, grant targeting processes, development of performance metrics and performance assessment, and mutual aid.

II. For their part, state governments and local jurisdictions can best leverage increasingly scarce resources by reallocating them toward

III. Intrastate regional collaborative structures and processes should be based on statewide statutory authorities whose priorities are primarily

driven bottom-up by local jurisdictions, as opposed to top-down by the federal government.

IV. All levels of government must establish effective enabling frameworks for public-private preparedness collaborations that utilize the time, talents, and resources of private-sector and volunteer organizations.

V. Professional development – training, education, and exercises – of homeland security and emergency management, particularly at the local level, must continue to be developed and sustained by all levels of government.